Israel to offer to build Spike anti-tank missile under Make in India

Admiral Lanba is the last Indian high-profile visitor to Israel before Prime Minister Narendra Modi lands in Tel Aviv on July 5.

Updated on: Jun 10, 2017, 23:38:48 IST

Hindustan Times, New Delhi | By Shishir Gupta

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Navy Chief Admiral Sunil Lanba, also the chairman of Chiefs of Staff Committee, will be on a four-day visit to Israel from Sunday as Tel Aviv is set to offer manufacturing of Spike hand held “fire and forget” anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) to India under Make in India.

Representative Image | Tel Aviv is set to offer manufacturing of Spike hand held “fire and forget” anti-tank guided missile (ATGM) to India under Make in India. (AP)

This is the last Indian high-profile visitor to Israel before Prime Minister Narendra Modi lands in Tel Aviv on July 5. Admiral Lanba will be in Israel till June 15.

Admiral Lanba visit comes after a Parliamentary delegation led by minister of state for agriculture and parliamentary affairs SS Ahluwalia went all over the Jewish nation in search of state of the art agricultural technologies.

Top government sources told Hindustan Times that Lanba will be visiting Haifa naval port along with interactions with Army and Air Force chiefs of Israel. His visit will be to understand regional security without delving into hardware acquisition.

However, it is now clear that Israel wants to participate in the Make in India initiative with offer to making Spike ATGM.

Even though the Modi government wants to focus on ties with Israel beyond defence, India is looking towards making medium altitude long endurance armed Heron TP unmanned aerial vehicle under Make in India.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shishir Gupta
Shishir Gupta is Executive Editor at Hindustan Times and one of India's top journalists covering national security, strategic affairs, foreign policy and geopolitics. Over the past three decades, he has extensively reported on India's military, diplomatic and security landscape, covering every major conflict and national security challenge, from the 1999 Kargil War and the 2020 East Ladakh standoff to Operation Sindoor in 2025. He has also covered major terror attacks, including the IC-814 hijacking, the 26/11 Mumbai attacks and the 2025 Pahalgam terror strike, along with numerous Pakistan-backed terrorist incidents in the Kashmir Valley and across India. He has reported on national and state elections for more than three decades. A recognised authority on strategic affairs, Gupta has covered India's nuclear programme since the Pokhran-II (Shakti series) tests in May 1998 and has written extensively on global nuclear issues, Indian diplomacy and the country's expanding global outreach. He has also reported widely on international conflicts and terrorism, with a special focus on the Indian subcontinent. Gupta has interviewed Prime Minister Narendra Modi more than four times, including Modi's first interview with the print media after becoming Prime Minister in May 2014. His other interviews include three with the Dalai Lama, as well as conversations with Benjamin Netanyahu, Amit Shah, Yogi Adityanath, S. Jaishankar, Nirmala Sitharaman and Piyush Goyal. He is the author of Indian Mujahideen: The Enemy Within (Hachette, 2011) and Himalayan Face-off: Chinese Assertion and Indian Riposte (Hachette, 2014). He was awarded the Chevening-Wolfson Joint Scholarship at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge, UK, in 1998 and participated in the International Visitor Leadership Program (IVLP) of the US State Department in 2006. He received the Ben Gurion Prize from Israel in 2011 and the K. Subrahmanyam Prize for Strategic Studies in 2015 from the Manohar Parrikar Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (MP-IDSA). Since 2024, he has hosted Point Blank, Hindustan Times' weekly YouTube show on global geopolitics.Read More